Articles on culture and cogntion: The Cental Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution

Donald, Merlin, "The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the 'Isolated Mind'", (chapter 2 in some book)
concept of brain-culture coevolution.
p. 20: But cognition science still proceeds as if culture did not matter. The only major exception to this is developmental psychology.
p. 21: two people who have influenced: Lev Vygotsky, first to recognize the symbiosis of developing mind wih culture, and Jerry Bruner, who carried this realization into the modern era.
p. 22: In most species, culture, insofar as it exists at all, does not factor into the evoluionary picture in this way.
p. 24: thus, by changing the kinds of cognitive environments to which infants are exposed, symbolic cultures can have a major epigenetic impact on the mind.
p. 25: conventional coevolutionary theories allow only for a tight, inflexible fit between brain and culture.
p. 25: There is an additional factor that affects brain-culture interactions, and it results from the juxtaposition of a super-plastic brain with our highly innovative symbolic cultures. Future generations can adjust to their drastically changed epigenetic environment without genetic change, through assive cultural intervention in their development.
P. 25: literacy developed in the New Stone Age, 5,000 years ago.
p. 28ff: about encultured apes
p. 29: human features: erect posture, changed vocal anatomy, increased brain volume.
p. 30: analysis of the apes' behaviour
p. 30: thus, just as Kanzi, we are also illusory creatures, products of an incessant process of cultural revolution that has kept raising the intellectual bar higher and higher.
p. 30: apes came close to human cognition as individuals, but they failed on the cultural side of the equation... apes continue to use symbols ony for a pragmatic personal agenda... collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic cultures... they never extended their use of symbols to hols anything resembling a conversation.

{my remark: perhaps the monkeys who were taught a language, but never learned to converse, prove that language in itself is not the issue; it is just a tool. the culture, its content, is the issue; but we still know nothing about how it came about. our facts are: brain is empty when born. it is filled by education and experience; this is done inter alia by language. the culture exists only in the brains of people}

p. 30-31: In their case, competence in the use of symbols was not sufficient to generate a cultural revolution, not even a very small one.
p. 31: In short, there seems to be more to generating culture than a sprinking of words and a smattering of grammar.
p. 31: Unthinkable as it may seem, we are not even certain that spoken language, as we know it, was part of our primordial profile as a species.
p. 31: our nervous systems are private entities, physically isolated from one another.
p. 32: We can escape from those little boxes and from our intellectual isolation in only one way - through action.
p. 32: The problem is that our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside.
p. 32: people who grew up in isolation...never invented symbols.
p. 32: isolated brains ... never invent language, not even a "language of thought" ... we know from the post hoc testimony
p. 33: how culture (language) started is in his work of 1991.
p. 33: he develped the complex of "mimetic skill" (mapping elementary event perceptions, thus creating action metaphore, also: gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self reminding and more), thus creating "mimetic culture".
p. 33: Vygotsky's find: children imitate external language first, and do not have inital inner speech (1986). Language is first acted out, and only later internalized.
p. 33: the flow goes OUTSIDE ---> INSIDE
p. 33: this process began 2 million years ago.
p. 34: CONSCIOUSNESS and SELF-CONSTRUCTION. we have a hybrid consciousness, multilayered, complex. Consiousness is a product of our evolution.
p. 34: I had not yet realized that consciousness might be the engine of our cognitive evolution. But I am now convinced that it is.
p. 35: conscious capacity is essential to cultural survival because symbolic cultures hides their secrets from all but the most attentive mind. Their surface appearance is deceiving.
p. 35: CULTURE IS INVISIBLE, it is not immediately present in perception. It takes a long time to learn it.
p. 35: executive capacities were developed to cope with culture. it enables a human being to manage and supervise their own cognitive activities while analyzing the second and third ordr patterns of culture.
p. 36: a bad pun: executive suite.
p. 36: components of the executive suite are all associated with the conscious capacity: memory component (working memory), directional component (directing our attention cleverly), evaluative component (how things of now are connected to things of yesterday or tomorrow. nonhumans don't have it) and there are more.
p. 36: consciousness is essential for understanding culture because culture is un-predictable the needs maximal flexibility in order to generalize rapidly from concrete and from partial information.
p. 36: CONSCIOUS CAPACITY IS THE KEY EVOLUTIONARY FEATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND. IT PROVIDES OUR CONNECTION WITH CULTURE.
p. 37: we do have innately programmed skills, built into our brain at birth, but is pays a much smaller roe in the human case. We developed a symbiotic relationship with culture and a conscious capacity to self-assemble cognitive architerctures.

Articles on culture and cogntion: Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain

Donald, Merlin, "Chapter Eighteen: Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain", in: Vilarroya, Oscar and Forn i Argimon, Francesc(a?), Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi (2007), 215-222.

p. 215
Cultural networks are a vital link in the human cognitive process. They greatly affect the way we carry out our cognitive business.
p. 216
What type of cognitive change would have enabled a group of archaic hominides to start developing a communication system that led eventually to the invention of highly variable and arbitrary ... distinctive grammars, and symbolic cultures?

In most species the range of possible behaviors is largely fixed in the genes and closely attuned to its ecological niche. This results in what is sometimes called a "specialist survival strategy".

Human beings have broken out of this morphological straitjacket. ... Where would such flexibility have begun to evolve? This question leads us logically back to the fundamentals of human motor skills and procedural learning. To learn... and individual must carry out a sequence of basic cognitive operations. Traditionally, these include rehearsing the action, observing its consequences, rememering these and then altering...varying the parameters dictated by the memory ... or by an idealized image.
p. 217
we might call {this}... a "rehearsal loop."

Apes appear to be quite poor at rehearsal and meta-cognitive review.
They can engage in socially facilitated imitation, but they cannot independently initiate and rehearse actions ... for the sole purpose of refining their movement sequences.

... in contrast, even young children routinely engage in practicing and refining such skills

a cluster of more basic capacities, including gesture, imitation, and voluntary rehearsal itself, appears to have a common underlying neuro-cognitive architecrture... I have called these components "mimetic kills", or mimesis.

Mimesis involved a revolution in motor skill but also rested on ... Hominids had to gain access to the content of their kinematic memories. Apes appear quite poot at this.

p. 218
... mimesis resides in an imaginative capability unique to human beings.
Human mimetic skills cut across all major sensory and motor modalities.

... we cannot easily reduce mimetic action to discrete or digital algorithms combined according to rules. Instead, it appears fuzzy in its logic, more like the visual recognition of faces.

p. 219

Hominids could not have evolved a capability for language ... without meeting the cognitive preconditions for inventing a morpho-phonology.

On present evidence, this level of mimetic skill would have sufficed to explain the major cognitive achievements of archaic Homo from about two million years ago until about 60,000. ...for evolving a set of shared expressive customs and for triggering a legacy of nonverbal culture.
Language ... came much later.

The cognitive development of human beings depends upon their links with culture.

... an individual mind is a wormhole in a vast culturally defined space. :)

p. 220
All cultural networks, even those of oral cultures, harness the cognitive resources of many individuals and impose a larger organization ... on the mental functioning of individuals.

The most important network-level resources of culture are undoubtedly writing and literacy.
... Oral cultures are limited to the biological memories of their members.

... The earliest literate cultures, such as those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Chine, resembled one another in their style f cognitive governance, despite great differences in the substance of their traditions.

Institutions ... are not conscious entities ... but they are cognitive entities and they do perform cognitive work.

p. 221
{they{ rarely depend on single individuals over the long run. They dominate the minds of their members, and individuals assimilate institutional values to such an extent that they rarely violate them.

culture ... invisible knowledge-gathering apparatus that reaches over time and space into the minds of millions of people.

It is difficult for us to accept the degree of our dependency... we are its primary servants.